


Playing Father

by Shadowlurker13



Category: Phantom of the Opera (2004)
Genre: F/M, Gen, post-relationship uneasy friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25495435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowlurker13/pseuds/Shadowlurker13
Summary: A quick one-shot on Erik's dubious decision to impersonate a young Christine Daae's recently deceased father. (Not quite an Erik/Antoinette, but almost.)
Relationships: Erik | Phantom of the Opera & Madame Giry
Kudos: 7





	Playing Father

**Author's Note:**

> (Author's note: I think I must've had this idea twice now in two years, each time after watching the movie, but I just got around to writing it - couldn't believe it hadn't been done. It's still easiest for me to work when I'm supposed to be working on something else;)

“Still taking in strays?”

The harsh, taunting male whisper came from directly behind Madame Giry’s right ear, making her heart automatically jump against her ribcage in surprise as her right hand shot to her chest, as if to hold it through the simple floral-print dressing gown over her night apparel. She knew perfectly well who it was without even looking; she didn’t even stop to wonder how he had spirited himself into her private locked chambers.

“Erik, you will be the death of me if you keep sneaking up on me like that,” she quietly exhaled, catching her breath, watching the room’s two other undisturbed occupants, their little chests going up and down slowly in the spare bed in the dark corner, eyes closed – two girls, one blonde, one brunette.

A gloved hand came to rest coolly on the back of her exposed neck (her auburn hair was bound up in a low bun), giving it a single stroke.

“You cannot sense my presence, Antoinette? Not even after all these years?” the voice murmured almost serenely.

She stepped away from his touch – but faced him. The Opera Populaire’s unwilling tenant had begun to favor modern formal evening-wear and dapper, short-cut black wigs in recent years over the sumptuously dark period costumes he used to lift when no one else was about; he could afford it now, having found a way to sponge ‘rent’ money off of their highly superstitious manager. Granted, the tailored cut of his tuxedoes _was_ flattering upon his spare, muscular form, but alas the clothing could do nothing to change the masses of ruined flesh underneath it, and nothing to hide his face; he still used a plaster mask he’d made himself one night in the house plasterworks in the small hours of the morning for that.

“Non,” she said simply, refusing to look him in the eye; she knew better than that, especially when he was in one of his moods, like he was right now. “I am only a ballet instructor. I am not a gypsy, nor a wizard, nor a mesmerist, nor a composer, nor any of the other wonderful things that you are,” she placated him by rote, as if he were a mulish, jealous child.

Which, of course, he _was_. At thirty. Not that he’d had many role models for male maturity. Between the feted aristocrats in their boxes, the grab-happy mechanics backstage, and the immature actors and singers with huge-yet-delicate egos upon it, boys didn’t seem to grow up in the Opera Populaire – not like they did in the outside world.

And that was her fault, too, in this case. Literally. But it had been the ‘dungeon’ of the building’s forgotten multilevel basements or the hangman’s noose for Erik. No question. Not even a choice.

“Not here; I just got the children to sleep. Hallway,” she mouthed.

The tall, thin, white-faced blackness moved aside for her as she stepped past him with her kerosene lamp, quietly turning the handle – the door still squeaked a little as she opened it slowly, wincing at the sound, passing through with the swish of a cape at her heels; she moved to close it, but a gloved hand closed gently upon her arm, and she stepped back for him. Erik closed the door without making a single humanly audible sound: it was but one of many of the man’s specialties. His fire-blue eyes flicked to her in the darkness, along with a sneering half-smile on the non-deformed portion of his face, moving away from the portal.

“Was your little Meg lonely, then, that you got her a puppy?”

“Don’t be so heartless, Erik,” she commenced stalking off toward the dressing rooms – the fastest shortcut to the basement, and something that they never discussed. A young, red-blooded man in Erik’s predicament of unwilling celibacy in almost unbelievable physical isolation could be forgiven a little harmless voyeurism now and again… or at least be turned a blind eye. “That new girl you just saw lost her father only last week – her only living relative. She is alone in the world now, but for us,” she cut him a fast backward glance to emphasize the point, unlocking the leading lady’s ostentatious powder-room, entering; the place always smelled of fresh roses even when there were none present, there had been so many in here. The door was noiselessly closed behind them, but with a single scoffed laugh afterwards.

“Another orphan,” he said at last in his own rich voice. “You have several already in the dormitories that claim that peculiar distinction. What’s so special about this one?”

The floor-length two-way mirror at the end of the room was the way out, down; Madame Giry used a portion of her robe to wipe off her fingerprints on the glass once she’d slid it aside to the right, revealing the back hallway. Surely this place had been used for trysts long before she had come to the dormitories as a dancer herself: it was literally designed to be.

It, too, closed silently in turn.

“Does the name Gustav Daae mean anything to you, Monsieur?” she began to play-act as if they were onstage in a domestic melodrama; sometimes Erik behaved better if he could be induced to stay in ‘character’.

The footsteps upon the damp stonework behind her stopped cold.

“Mon dieu, the Swedish violinist! He could be the next Vivaldi! And you mean to say he’s…”

She nodded sadly.

“His only child, Christine. Her mother died in labor.”

They continued walking. Neither had to say a word. Both knew that as much as some in society looked down their noses at the ballerinas of the Opera Populaire as overly glorified call-girls, that such a girl’s life outside the Opera was likely to turn that way rather quickly, if they did not go into domestic service or the poorhouse. Talent – any talent – could literally mean the difference between life and death on the tough streets of Paris.

“And does she believe in the lie of God, the pabulum of heaven?”

Madame Giry quietly laughed.

“You would approve of her, Monsieur – she is a heretical Protestant, as many are in her home country. But she knows enough to pray for the soul of her father; she has already been once in our chapelle, to set up his photograph there.”

“I have never seen the man’s likeness, only heard of him. May I?”

She shrugged – “But of course” – and adjusted her route, turning left past cobwebs and scurrying rats, through a rough unmarked wooden door and into the larger, cleaner hallway that led to the first lower level, just below the street outside. Down around the curving stone staircase they went; if it were not for her presence ahead of him, in the way, she was certain that present company could’ve flown down the precipitous descent of risers in complete absence of light, as he had done since he was a boy of eleven.

Light from the street lamps outside faintly illuminated the lead-stained-glass window in the outer wall, the only source of ‘natural’ light in the little makeshift chapelle, barely a stone closet with a set of small votive candles and likenesses of absent or dead loved ones; most were treasured painted miniatures, but a couple were made in the new fashion with light and chemicals upon a metal plate – colorless, but more realistic.

She pointed to one of these, holding her lamp a bit nearer so that he could make out the face clearly.

He smirked bitterly, bending closer. “He was a right handsome devil.”

“A pretty face will not save a man from the pneumatic fever, Monsieur,” she rebuked him coldly – then softened a bit. “It’s a shame, to lose such a talent at such a young age; he was younger than us, I think.”

She watched as Erik studied the features, the dark curly hair and darker eyes. M. Daae looked haunted somehow – most likely just lack of sleep, a common enough malady for a genius, as well he knew personally – and yet there was tenderness in the man’s visage, as if he could will his affection to the one meant to look at it.

That genius, though…

“His child… has she shown any aptitude for music yet?”

The question was perhaps inevitable, especially for him, although apparently many had been asking similar questions about the girl for years.

“I know not, Monsieur. She has only just arrived.” She gave his unspoken pregnant expectancy an exasperated little shrug. “I suppose she could, but that is not why she shares my quarters. I cannot simply dump her into the dormitory with the other girls – she barely speaks any French yet! She needs time to adjust, to learn. Perhaps she will be a friend to my Meg, the sister I cannot give her – _non_ ,” she turned her face away from him before he could take her chin, forcing her to look up at him. Once, when they had both been far younger, she had told him that she would kiss him were he but handsome and he had in turn mesmerized her on an equally playful whim so that she saw the good side of his face as a mirror-image – complete, whole – just to see if he could do it. The effect had been nothing short of stunning… but the illusion had not held up to touch; her fingertips had immediately found the invisible mottled tissue and hard distorted scarring left by the acid his mother had failed to abort him with. The incident ended in mutual tears. So many things unspoken yet known, remembered, like the fact that Meg was illegitimate, her father well-off enough to ignore her mother’s very existence. “I cannot speak for what she will be – I am not a fortune-teller – but she has the grace and build of a dancer, and that is what I intend to make of her, to give her some chance at life before she is old enough for even that little to be taken away from her.”

Her silent companion had gone to lean against the angel-frescoed back wall – which they both knew was false – his arms crossed.

“So the lady with the iron heart feels after all,” he noted, strangely without malice. “You intend to play her _maman_ until she knows better from having been under your whip at the barre.”

She nodded with a melancholy little lifeworn smile, looking off into the distance, through the window depicting St. Michael. “Why not. The world is cruel enough without us adding to its cruelty.”

Her companion was quiet for just one measure too long; she dared a glance at him and caught his look of stunned comprehension, his pale, fierce eyes blown mania-wide, the way he looked when a new piece of score first thundered through that great brain of his – and she immediately wished that she could swallow her last words and send him on his way to bedevil the stagehands in the attics, his most recent pet hobby that involved other people. She didn’t care to think what he would be like as an old man, but such a life of human privation would serve to make any man more than a little eccentric by the time he died.

And she did not like where _this_ was going.

“ _Non_. No one can even know that you exist. No one,” she carefully tried an unrelated rational tack; sometimes she could get through to him laterally.

It didn’t take. “But I could _do_ it! I could play her father, just as you can play her mother – you _know_ I could! I would be so good! Her father won’t come back to scold me: he is a ghost!” he gave a crazy little laugh. “Is that not what they say of me?” he added with an arch peevishness that far better suited a two-year-old than a grown man. “I can already play the violin passably well, but I could vastly improve upon it in a short enough period of time if I bent my will to the task!”

“And where did you even _get_ a violin, or the money to buy one if it is not stolen, with the way you throw your ill-gotten gains away on expensive food and clothing like a degenerate comte-”

The line was well passed before she even realized that she’d crossed it; he could be so thoughtlessly casual with her about practically anything that it could be so easy to forget that she could not be that same way when it came to talking about _him_ , even ‘after all these years’. They had technically been acquainted since late childhood, when she’d smuggled him away from the police, into the basement.

An inhuman fury like Vesuvius about to erupt boiled behind his impossible eyes – but it unexpectedly blew out on a light breeze, and he was suddenly a little boy. “I found it. In a closet. Some fool had forgotten it. So I took it home and cared for it.”

It was such a pathetically feeble lie that she would’ve openly laughed in derision had it come from anyone else. Coming from Erik, it made her want to sob. They had never discussed this, either – it was a long enough list of subjects to have been drawn up and notarized by committee – but the man sometimes retreated mentally into infancy when being faced with a non-negotiable wrong that he had committed, the behavior likely hearkening back to a time when he was beaten severely and regularly simply for breathing.

She didn’t have the heart to take him back there, to make him face it.

“You couldn’t keep it up,” she tried to press onward. “It is far harder to fool a girl of fifteen or sixteen years than a child of seven – think! How could you even _do_ it, so that she could not see you?”

“Ah, but that is the most wonderful part, Antoinette!” he took her arms excitedly. “Do you not know that there are exactly two-hundred-and-seventeen places in this building where the walls, floor, or ceiling are so thin that sound can travel straight through, clearly enough not to muffle conversation? It is the sort of thing one notices when one lives in such places – it would be so impossibly _easy_! I can already throw my voice like a ventriloquist! I could get better! It would be so much fun!” His rambling was speeding up. “I could-”

“You would lose all contact with her well before she turns _twenty-five_ ,” Madame Giry stopped his ecstatic ranting cold. “How long do you think a career as a ballerina lasts, Monsieur? People only want to see them when their bodies are young. When they get old like me, they teach their art to others if they are lucky, and find other occupations if they are not,” she lowered her eyes, feeling his grip relax.

But he did not let go. “Or some wealthy patron’s bed,” he breathed, “for a little while.”

She stepped out of his grasp, away. “It is all the same in the end. We are poor, and so we sell ourselves. I do not expect a man to understand this, not even you.”

She _could_ feel his eyes then, but chose to outwardly ignore it. She sighed.

“I sympathize with your boredom here, Erik, but it would simply be too cruel to Christine. Better that she learns to let her papa go in peace than to make a farce of his death.”

“Do you think it is a farce, _madam_ , when there is no one left in the world to love you?!”

Madame Giry forgot to breathe, from the raw anguish in his voice, and felt ashamed. She had tried almost out of a sense of Christian duty, but she could not fill that hole, knowing him as she did; her teeth lightly gritted together.

His flesh was not the only thing that was warped, even if it was not his fault.

He continued, unheeding of her reaction.

“I would give the good side of my body – the use of my right hand – to have heard just once that either of my parents had cared for me, had _wanted_ me, even losing them afterwards! This child will _not_ forget that she is loved! She will _not_ be left until she makes her way in the world! You say she has much to learn; there are things that only a father can teach, that only _her_ father could. I can teach her music-”

“You will not even teach Meg – and I have _asked_ you!” she volleyed back, turning, hands on her hips, feeling steadier again.

“Your _Meg_ cannot put two notes together to save her pretty little skin! We both know she’s being groomed as your understudy, to take your place and keep the money coming in when you are too feeble and arthritic to instruct the dancers anymore! Her future is secure no matter what, for as long as she can keep her health and her limbs in perfect condition! Let us be honest with each other, since we are such _old friends_ : the composer’s daughter has no future, only a present on charity – yours. Let me give Daae’s girl that same chance. Coloratura sopranos and even good altos can get paying roles well into middle-age, long enough to put something by for when they _cannot_.”

“Monsieur-”

“I will _never_ be a father, Antoinette,” he ground out bitterly, advancing on her a step, his wolf-feral eyes piercing her to the quick, “I will never be a _husband_. Will you take even _this_ from me?”

“Erik, please, I _know_ that-”

“You are perhaps afraid that I will hurt her because I do not know how to love a child? I see fear in your eyes now – do not bother to hide it.” He suddenly paused. “You fear that I _cannot_ love… because I never was _._ ”

He did not have to say what came next. He only looked disappointed and a little ashamed, that he had not thought of the objection sooner.

She surprised him by taking his hand.

“Non, mon ami,” she answered gently, looking down at their entwined fingers. “I know you could love a child, given the chance. You would spend all your love at once. You could love her more than your own life.” She dared a glance up and saw his look of animalistic, bright-eyed confusion. “That is exactly what has me terrified.”


End file.
